Hmmmm - given that one doesn't exist any more, I'm going to go with the alternative.

No contest...a business that has been put out of it's misery VS a company that continues it's reign of terror.

My vote is BOA.

Circuit City just incompetent-ed themselves out of jobs. Bad at running a company, but not evil. BoA defines evil.

CC embodies the ultimate fail possible for a business. BOA are the standard banking soulless, greedy, sell-your-own-mother-then-give-yourself-a-raise-types.

Leave the dead to rest. Bank of America wins this one in a landslide.

I've never opened an account with Bank of America, and yet I've had three with them. The first was when they bought SeaFirst Bank. The second was when they bought MBNA. and the third was when they bought Countrywide.

Given how they've found new and exciting ways to extract money from me each time they take over the companies I *wanted* to do business with, I've spent the better part of my adult life running away from these bastards.

Psst...BoA - I'm about to refinance my home so that you stop receiving interest payments from me. Now fark off.

@JediJohn82: Exactly.

I have a Bank of America account and I still didn't vote for them. Circuit City is still haunting me from beyond the grave. I want my $50, you bastards!

@INsano: I would argue that it should be stated this way:

"BOA is THE standard in banking soulless, greedy, sell-your-own-mother-then-give-yourself-... to which all greedy banks aspire."

@Radi0logy: I'd say screwing people out of rebates is pretty evil.

One got me some decent video game deals two months ago, VS the other that wanted to to double my interest rate for no good reason... BofA wins!

@sprocket79: Was that really Circuit City for the most part? Or their vendors?

@yagisencho: This keeps happening to me too. MBNA, LaSalle ... I keep having to close accounts to escape them.

(I worked for BofA once, incidentally. It was not a bad place to work. But I still felt no urge to bank there. Maybe I would have changed my mind had I been there longer.)

@sprocket79: Four weeks! Twenty papers! That's two dollars plus tip! I want my two dollars!

Now and then I have dealt with B of A, my most recent experience was opening a checking account to direct deposit my SSN check. It was closed 2 days later and it took six weeks to get my $100 opening deposit back. You can see details on this nonsense at: [bankofamericageorgiasucks.blogspot.com] one thing I caught them on was that their fraud department will access your credit reports and use them in making the decision to close the account but the DO NOT notify you that the credit bureaus were used.

The Executive Office guy accidently made reference to their having done a credit report and I was all over him like stink on a cheap suit for their NOT having provided me with the required letter so I could exercise my right to obtain copies of the 2 bureau reports.

I did eventually get the letter and I imagine that the guy got ripped a new one by B of A for having made tyhe mistake of letting this way they ignore Federal credit regulations. You can see the correspondence and how this played out on the above site. If you are in a dispute with them you might want to print out a copy of the B of A letter for your files.

@Quibbs0: Wouldn't the one which is no longer in business be a worse company? So bad they couldn't stay in business?

@Radi0logy: I didn't realize there were two contests here. Worst Company in America and, apparently, Most Evil Company in America. When did this become about evilness?

@HFC:

Seeing as how this contest is being run by a blog about consumer rights one can naturally assume that the context of the competition is how said company treats their employees, consumers, and general environment as a whole (i.e. how "evil" that are) as opposed to how successful the business is.

Were this competition being held in a Business Blog then one could naturally assume the opposite but it's not therefor it's most likely a competition about the evilness of said corporations.

@yagisencho: If only BoA would die already. I just loved the article by one of the family members of the founder: priceless!

Winning the worst company award just isn't satisfying. They need to file chapter 7 along with Merril Lynch

@Radi0logy: It was Circuit City. Trust me, if it was a vendor problem I would have marched over to Logitech's office and demanded my rebate. Basically they offered a rebate and then didn't fund it and then went out of business. If they weren't incompetent AND evil, they would have funded their own rebate before offering it.

@BacteriaEP: Offering a bad customer (or "consumer") experience does not equate to being evil. Continually offering bad service makes a company bad. When you rank them all, one is the worst. Still has nothing to do with evil.

I went the other way. I voted CC because it was so bad it went out of business. Can't say I like B of A though, they cut my credit from $10k to $500 on one card despite a perfect payment record, and cut off another card completely.

@HFC: CC is a better company because it went away.

I voted for circuit city - their horrible mismanagement cost thousands of employees their jobs. If BofA was that bad they'd be out of business already too. So BofA seems to be the tortoise in this crap race, which didn't manage to beat the hare.

In these earlier rounds anyone going up against Bank of Mexico is going to look like the Vienna Boys Choir.

Had to go BoA on this one. They bought out my credit card, moved the due date up a half month without notifying me and made me wait over an hour on hold to talk to a manager about it. Probably because they did it to so many other people too. They tried to charge me interest and a late fee and the customer service rep called me a liar when I told her they hadn't notified me of the due date change, which they hadn't. Needless to say, I closed the card and will NEVER do business with them again.

Wow, this is kinda like back in grade school when we picked up for dodgeball and I'd get picked second to last because I wasn't as bad as Jeff M****s. Then Jeff changed schools and I moved into last pick, AKA - best target, by default...

@Radi0logy: Indeed. CC incompetent-ed themselves out of business, while BoA incompetent-ed themselves INTO business.

Wait, what?

@JediJohn82: No contest either way. BoA

bank of america. i have to vote BofA after the shitty experiences that people i know have from dealing with them. going and not considering ATM usage in Las Vegas as suspicious when we're never in that area is complete assholery of them and then trying to blame my dad for it when he reported it to them plus not giving the money back makes it so i have to call them as the winners.

I can't see voting for Circuit City since they're already out of business. So I'll go with BoA.

I voted BOA because their warnings for this quarter just made the market shit itself again, breaking a week long rally.

I opened up a Keep the Change account with B of A, which rounded up every debit card purchase to the nearest dollar and put the change in a savings account. I had to open a savings account to use this feature. Then they charged me $4 per month for the savings account. What a ripoff.

I'm now with a credit union. It sucks, too, but not as badly as B of A.

@yagisencho: Two words...credit union :)

I've had 2 keep the change accounts and the corresponding savings account for each for the last about 3 years and can say I have NEVER had a problem with BoA ever. CC definitely has my vote on this one.

I'm still pissed off about AT&T being knocked out of the first round. I voted for BofA just to spite all you people who knocked out a real life evil corporation.

@JediJohn82: Where were you guys when AT&T was up against CC?

@HFC: i look at it more like "one down, one to go".

@Radi0logy: AT&T is far more evil than BofA. AT&T set up secret rooms for the NSA to illegally spy on American citizens without a warrant. It is a company that set up the infrastructure for fascism, yet it didn't even make it out of the first round against CC.

I work at PNC, and I am required to explain at account opening that we will look at your prior banking (not credit) history to check that you haven't screwed over six other banks beforehand. I think that's reasonable.

It took me three years to close a checking and savings account at Bank of America. BOA wins hands down.

Bank of America has a negatory on my credit report. I have never done business with them! I hope they beat Citibank for WCIA! And I hope they go bankrupt! I hope the CEO dies of a heart attack! Better yet, I hope Obama fires him!

DOWn, baby, DOWn!

Circuit City (#5955) crushes Bank of America (#705) on Vanno.

BofA stole $65 from me.

@saya:

Yes, exactly.

Circuit City's dead Jim!

With that said, Circuit City was just plain lame. Yeah, they fought me of a bad dvd player - wahh... They shorted me $10.00 on a coupon...

BoA however can really fark things up for you and take months to fix it. Now BoA can really be worrisome. In my case they linked my credit card to someone-else's checking account's overdraft protection. At the end of the month found my card was tipple maxed over $10k, Took them eight weeks months to fix it. Then they tried to re-bill me for the interest from their fault, THEN AT MONTH FIVE there were still transactions "Stuck" in their system and that took another two months to fix.

@KHook321:
Yes indeed... CC no longer belongs in the competition.

@HFC: Worst could be interpreted either as naughty or poorly run, which is why it's such a beautiful word. I try to vote on balance - which company/management just scares the crap out of me. In the AIG/PCA, for example, AIG seems greedy while PCA just doesn't care - the latter is more scary to me. In this one, BoA was scarier to me than CC (I actually had more good than bad experiences at CC). CC was more poorly run, but BoA would probably destroy my fiscal life and think nothing of it.

Which is why I use them for my safe deposit box.